Night's Black Agents (Paxton Locke Book 2) Read online

  “You seem to be staring daggers at me,” Helen remarked, studying the girl’s outfit. She wore thick-soled boots, cargo pants, and a pink tank top much too small to contain the bounteous curves of her chest. Scrub her face, pull out the metal and give her a normal hairstyle and clothing and she’d be quite lovely. Kids today.

  “I saw you on the news,” the girl said. She jutted her chin out in defiance. “I’m Chloe.”

  Amused, Helen said, “Hello, Chloe.”

  “It’s true, then,” the younger woman said. “What they said. You’re a—” She hesitated, as though reluctant to speak the word.

  “A witch, an enchantress, a wizard. I’m particular to sorceress, myself,” she admitted. “Is that all?”

  “Can I—” Chloe glanced at the people on either side of her. If they were her friends, they looked as though they’d give anything to be anywhere else. “Can I come with you?”

  Helen smiled. “Well, that depends,” she purred. She reached down and took Chloe by the hand. She turned her palm over and ran a finger along the inside of her forearm. The would-be acolyte shivered, and not just from the physical sensation of Helen’s touch. Something not-unlike a spark crackled from the top of her finger to Chloe’s skin as she pulled her second hand away. “Do you have what it takes?”

  “I do,” the girl blurted. “I must.”

  Helen gave her a sad look. “Alas, you do not.” She patted the top of her hand, then leaned in close. “But I must thank you, Chloe.” The girl looked puzzled. “You’ve reminded me of something that I’d forgotten. I was away for so long, you know, that I never considered the possibility of infamy. And where I’m going, being recognized would be an impediment to my goals. Would you like to know a secret?”

  Eyes wide, Chloe nodded.

  “There are no such things as vampires, but as with many creatures of folklore, the legend has a basis in fact. The stories originated from a group of Eastern European magic users who crafted a means of extending life.” Helen brought her lips close to the younger woman’s ear, squeezed her wrist tight, and whispered an arcane word.

  The squeal that burst from Chloe’s lips was high and animal-like, but it cut off just as quickly as it had come. Her body shook slightly, and with each shake, she became less of what she once was. Well-tanned skin turned paper thin, and the thick braid of her hair grew wispy and faint. Rounded curves sank in, and when Helen let go, the skeleton inside Chloe’s clothing collapsed in on itself and fell back into one of the seated revelers. Screams rose in the room, but she ignored them.

  Helen stood, staggering just a bit. The proportions of her body felt off, her center of gravity higher. The sensation lasted for only a moment, and as she recovered her equilibrium, she reveled in the rush of energy pulsing through her limbs. She spread her fingers wide and marveled at the taught, unlined skin on the back of her hands. Her clothing felt all wrong now; tight in some areas while loose in others, but that was no matter. She had no means of looking at herself, but she knew the outcome of the spell. Her face was no longer entirely her own—instead, it contained a blend of Chloe’s features and her familiar face. Someone new, older than Chloe and younger than Helen, and as of yet on no wanted posters.

  Giselle and Kelsey merely looked shocked; Roxanne’s face shifted from surprise to something closer to hunger. Helen smiled to herself as she recognized the redhead’s expression. Another hook for your loyalty, my dear. All in due time.

  She stroked the tightened flesh of her neck and murmured, “Ready to go, ladies?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Paxton

  Joplin, Missouri—Monday morning

  From the sound of it, my back made a pretty serious dent in the trunk of the salesman’s car. I didn’t stop and reflect on it, though. I was too impressed with the fact that he’d picked me up with one hand.

  Then there was the fact that the fingers wrapped around my neck felt somehow wrong. I clawed at them, trying to ease the compression on my windpipe, and the digits seemed almost to stretch in my grip. Something pinched the back of my neck as his thumb and index finger met.

  Now, I’m no meathead, but my neck is a reasonable size. No way this guy should have been able to pull off a 360-degree strangle move on me. I’d seen the stubby little sausages attached to his hand while he’d read the newspaper.

  Of course, a sausage-fingered salesman shouldn’t have been able to resist a push, either. Say that five times fast.

  Red crushed in around my vision as he bore in, and I decided it was time to fight dirty. I stopped trying to peel the fingers off of my throat and swung a wild punch at the salesman’s head with my right hand. He made an amused-sounding chuckle and hunched his shoulder to intercept my fist. Where I should have struck bone, I hit something squishier. I’d have cringed if I wasn’t so focused on other things.

  On the bright side, the few spells I’ve picked up from Mother’s grimoire are cast in a non-verbal fashion. The action is more akin to muscle memory, which is handy when your throat is being crushed by some dude with tentacle fingers.

  I made a blade with my left hand, jabbed it forward, and let fly with my telekinesis spell. In a dream world, I’d have been able to toss my attacker across the parking lot with a wave of my hand. In this case, though, the spell is limited to my own, actual strength. Which is great when you want to fetch a drink from the fridge, but not so much in a real fight.

  But there’s force, and then there’s force. One of the interesting things about having Cassie around was getting a second set of eyes on certain preconceptions I’d taken on things.

  She hadn’t been in the basement when I’d used the TK spell to help launch a hot water heater like a bottle rocket, but I’d explained the concept, and grabbed her a drink or two while I did so. At which time she’d pointed something out that made me want to slap my forehead in wonder.

  A knife blade works because the edge of the blade focuses the applied force onto a relatively narrow plane, which increases the effect of said force. Now obviously, a metal knife is limited in terms of just how thin it can go. A razor blade is sharp, but it’s also fragile.

  The planes of force on either side of my outstretched palm met at an edge that was, in essence, as thin as I could imagine. So long as my will held, there was no chance that this blade would break.

  I punched up with my left hand, shoving my fingers up into the salesman’s elbow. There was the slightest hint of resistance, a high-pitched inhuman squeal, and a viscous black ichor sprayed my chest and the trunk of the car.

  The salesman staggered back with half an arm. The grip around my throat slackened. I tore the hand away and discarded it as I hopped to the ground. “An elegant weapon,” I intoned. “For a more civilized age.”

  Salesman screamed again and lunged back at me. He was still freaking fast, but my strike must have taken some of the gumption out of him because I ducked under his slap. I continued forward into a roll and came up into a crouch behind him.

  Tires squealed on the pavement as Cassie came around the corner. The fight had only seemed like an eternity. I glanced at her as she slammed on the Thor’s brakes and brought it to a halt a dozen yards from the salesman’s sedan.

  “Shotgun!” I yelled, turning back to face my attacker. He lunged at me again. I side-stepped this time and went invisible. The spell effect isn’t perfect—there’s a bit of shimmer in the air around me when I use it—but if I stay still, it’s hard to pick out.

  As I winked out of sight, the salesman crouched down lower to the ground. The black ooze from his stump had congealed into something solid, and that something was starting to push out. If he was growing the arm back, it was sure to be a messed up one. It looked more like a tentacle than anything else.

  That wasn’t the only part of him that was shifting, somehow. His face had flattened, and the thinning hair on top of his head had fallen out. Instead of eyes, he had empty spans of mushroom-white flesh. All that remained of his nose were a pair of vertical slits, and hi
s mouth had drawn into a circle. Inside the circle, a quartet of serrated triangular teeth continuously cycled open and closed. I opened my mouth to crack a joke about a walking garbage disposal, but discretion stilled my tongue.

  I took another step to the side, and he cocked his now-earless head. I don’t know how he was seeing or hearing without any external sensory organs, but I wasn’t going to complain. It was pretty obvious that he outmatched me hand-to-hand.

  Cassie opened the door to the RV. She stepped out, bearing a Mossberg Shockwave—and revealed the glitch in my plan.

  The salesman gave a pizza-cutter grin and pivoted to face Cassie. With jerky, ground-covering lopes—were his legs stretching out, too?—he headed toward her.

  I dropped the cloak and whipped a hand out. An imaginary cord of force looped around his ankles and took me for a skidding ride across the parking lot until I arrested his momentum and sent him into a face plant in the gravel. Sprinting forward myself, I jumped on his back and slammed both knees into him. If he was breathing, I’d hopefully just knocked the air out of his lungs, but I didn’t stop there.

  I force-bladed him between the shoulder blades, and more of that black ooze sprayed out as his suit jacket and flesh parted. I glanced up to Cassie and held out my other hand for the Shockwave. She headed toward me, but before she could hand it off, the tentacle arm slid around my waist and started to squeeze.

  I looked back down and resisted the urge to barf. I don’t know if the salesman had rotated his head 180 degrees or if he’d just pushed his face through the back of his head, but those blank eye sockets were firmly fixed on me. His good arm wrenched backward and grabbed me by one shoulder. I still had him held down, but he was more than strong enough to pull me closer. The teeth, if anything, began to cycle even faster.

  One of them shattered as Cassie jabbed the muzzle of the shotgun into his face. The other three ground against the metal cylinders of the barrel and magazine tube, but that quit as soon as she pulled the trigger and discharged a shell of #1 buck into the salesman’s head. The leprous white flesh of his head collapsed a bit, and the tentacle around my waist relaxed its grip, but the body underneath me still squirmed with inhuman life.

  “Oh, to hell with this.” I shoved my blade through his neck and into the asphalt below. Wisps of smoke curled up from the superheated tar, but as soon as the head and body were twain, the body below shuddered and fell still.

  Heart pounding, I took a couple of deep breaths and looked Cassie in the eye. “You all right?”

  “Am I all right? Holy shit, Pax!”

  “Encyclopedia salesman,” I said, standing on unsteady feet. “Wouldn’t take no for an answer. I—”

  The cop cars weren’t running their sirens, but they had their lights going, and as they squealed around the truck stop and boxed us in, a no-nonsense voice shut down any more witty commentary on my part.

  “Weapon on the ground! Hands in the air!”

  Agent Valentine

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin—Sunday night

  Towel wrapped around his waist, Special Agent Matthew Valentine ran his fingers over the tapestry of scars adorning his skin. Most had faded with time and would have been overlooked by any tenured military doctor with experience in such things. There were still plenty of fresher ones to study. Here was the puckered depression of a bullet wound, decorated with the scalpel-slice where the doctors had gone in to pin his collarbone back together. The narrow slashes of any number of knives and bladed weapons had left thin, almost delicate marks on his frame, but they paled in comparison to the quartet of parallel lines that started on the right side of his abdomen, hooked up toward his heart, and stopped at the bottom of his sternum. The thick, ropy scars bore testimony to where doctors had pieced together the shredded flesh.

  He’d suffered the wounds a long time ago—so long, in fact, that he could hardly remember the pain. Valentine had heard it said that there was something in the human mind’s reaction to pain that prevented it from retaining those memories. He wasn’t sure how accurate that was. He remembered the events before and after his near-disembowelment just fine.

  As far as forgetting the pain, not a day went by that he didn’t recall the agony of his oldest scar. This wound lay on the inside of his left forearm—a sunken pucker, like the gunshot, but as big around as a soda can. A second triangle-shaped scar lay on top of the depression, and the skin there had a burn-mark sheen.

  “Time heals all wounds,” he murmured. He picked up the tumbler of bourbon on the desk and toasted his reflection. Ice clinked in the empty glass as he set it down. Another saying, and an accurate one, Valentine supposed. His oldest scars, with the exception of the mark on his arm, had faded from his skin if not his mind. The oldest remained, long-healed but fresh in its own way. A reminder, perhaps, or a promise.

  Shaking his head at his melancholy, Valentine threw the towel in the direction of the bathroom floor and pulled on a pair of gym shorts. He refilled the shot glass and sat down on the bed. As hotel mattresses went, it wasn’t horrible, but he held no illusions about sleep. He considered the remote control for a moment, but the only thing more barren than the desert where he’d received the scar on his arm was late night television in the twenty-first century. He settled back against the pillows and took a considerate sip of bourbon as he stared into the empty black eye of the flat screen TV.

  For nearly a week, he and his partner had been chasing down fruitless leads. Oh, the effort hadn’t been entirely in vain, but in terms of capturing their quarry, they were spinning their wheels. They wouldn’t have even had names or numbers for most of the group if not for a lucky break involving the fingerprints of a dead body.

  Well, three bodies, all dead, with a viscous green-black sludge for blood. The local coroner’s office had been more than happy to turn those corpses over to the Federal task force led by Valentine and his partner. The fact that the bodies were identical down to the fingerprints and dental records just sent the weird factor through the stratosphere.

  “Witches,” he said under his breath with a grimace. Valentine tossed the rest of his drink back with a sneer and set the empty glass on the bedside table. There wasn’t much he hadn’t encountered in his time, and the unit’s run-ins with the clone-familiars were particularly memorable.

  A rogue element had taken them down before Valentine and his partner had arrived on the scene, and for some unknown reason, the director had restricted them to clean-up duty only. The fact that Helen Locke—the root source of this particular flock of witches—should have been sanctioned years ago still rankled.

  Valentine held no illusions as to his place in the world. He was a spear-carrier; a useful and deadly instrument. But that didn’t mean that he was stupid enough to leave potential threats alive. He’d fought the decision as much as he dared, but the prior director had vetoed his request.

  Wonder if I could track him down and give him an ‘I told you so.’ Pleasant daydreams tumbled through his mind, but he shook them off with a smile. The new administration had cleaned house, sweeping out the old, touchy-feely boss man. The new director held promise—even if he did have some idiosyncrasies of his own.

  The three sets of cloned fingerprints had led them to Trace Jensen of Milwaukee. College students didn’t normally have rap sheets or fingerprints in CODIS, but they’d caught a lucky break. Jensen had been caught up in a noise complaint and gotten probation for underage consumption. Valentine wasn’t sure how an under-aged frat boy had become monster fodder for a witch’s spell, but he and Agent Eliot had spent most of their time tracking down Jensen’s acquaintances and trying to figure out who’d gone missing.

  The discovery that the frat boy’s girlfriend, Melanie Gennaro, was nowhere to be found had clicked another piece of the puzzle into place. Valparaiso PD’s welfare check of the Gennaro family home turned up signs of a struggle. After some jurisdictional finagling, dental records from her parents and younger brother matched three skeletons found in the burnt remnants of
Helen Locke’s family home.

  Valentine didn’t know the exact timeline of events, and he didn’t like that lack of knowledge. If he was certain of anything, it was that Locke’s wayward son Paxton—the rogue element—was involved. He’d made a request to shake him down for information, but the new director had rejected the request. For now, Paxton Locke was untouchable.

  That didn’t mean that Valentine hadn’t bucked the rules. Posing as a doctor, he’d made a visit to Locke in his hospital room. He’d told himself that it was merely to size the young man up, to take his measure, but the visit had left him with more questions than answers. He had a good gut instinct about people when it came to things that went bump in the night, and he didn’t think Locke was playing for the other team, but…

  Valentine sighed and considered the slowly melting ice in the glass. The thought of another drink was a tempting one, but he knew that if he didn’t pull the plug soon he was going to have one whale of a headache in the morning. He and Eliot planned on conducting more interviews of Gennaro and Jensen’s circle of friends, and those always went smoother when he wasn’t nursing a hangover.

  Before he could make a move one way or another, a quick series of knocks on his hotel room door snapped him out of his reverie. Valentine slid off the bed without a look and pulled the door open. The quick but measured cadence of the rapping told him all he needed to know. “What’s up?”

  His partner, Nick Eliot, had perpetually-tired eyes and mussed hair that was well-longer than Federal law enforcement employee regulations. Those eyes danced with a manic energy, now, and Valentine raised an eyebrow.

  “Confirmed sighting,” his partner said. “We need to move.”

  Valentine remained in the doorway. “Where?”

  Eliot fidgeted in place for a moment before speaking. “University of Iowa.”

  He cursed. “How in the hell did she get past the cordon?”